The Strait of Hormuz crisis has exposed something that years of congressional shipbuilding studies and Government Accountability Office reports had already documented and nobody had adequately addressed: the United States maintains the world’s most powerful navy and has steadily lost its ability to use that navy to maintain the maritime order that underwrites its own economy. The shipbuilding budget has doubled over thirty years while the fleet has not grown at all. Three years’ worth of Tomahawk missiles at current production rates have been expended in a single regional operation. Naval capacity has been drained from every theater the roughly 280-ship fleet is supposed to serve simultaneously. The Pacific — where the strategic stakes of the coming decade are highest — is less ready now than it was before Operation Epic Fury began.
The deepest irony of the Hormuz deployment is its beneficiary. China imports a substantial share of its oil through the Persian Gulf. American naval forces are guaranteeing the security of Chinese energy supply lines while simultaneously degrading American readiness in the Western Pacific, where any future confrontation with China would actually occur. The strategic logic of that arrangement has not been publicly examined by any administration or congressional committee with the seriousness it deserves.
Three Overlapping Disorders
The analytical framework that has been missing from American maritime strategy is not complicated, but it requires distinguishing between maritime collapse, which is not happening, and maritime disorder, which is. Ships still sail, oil still flows in most corridors, and data still moves through undersea cables. But the security conditions underlying those functions are steadily eroding in ways that make the system more expensive to maintain and more vulnerable to deliberate exploitation.
The first form of disorder is coercive: the deliberate use of affordable disruption to generate leverage without crossing into open conflict. The Red Sea campaign demonstrated the economics with clarity — Houthi forces using inexpensive drones and missiles imposed global rerouting costs on the largest shipping firms in the world, while the United States and its partners responded with naval systems whose per-unit cost dwarfed the threats they were countering. The Hormuz crisis applies the same asymmetric logic at far greater economic consequence. Iran mines a strategic waterway, deploys cheap drones and missiles to keep it contested, and forces the United States to commit capital ships, Tomahawk stockpiles, and crew readiness to a theater that was never the primary focus of American naval planning.
The second is structural disorder: the fundamental misalignment between American naval power and American maritime industrial capacity. The United States accounts for less than one percent of global commercial shipbuilding output. Europe has strong commercial shipping capacity but has lost nearly a third of its main surface combatants since 1999. China has simultaneously built the world’s largest navy by ship count, dominates global shipbuilding output, and leads in port infrastructure and maritime logistics — producing new warships at a peacetime pace that rivals American output in the months following Pearl Harbor. No coalition of Western states can secure maritime flows coherently when that imbalance is this pronounced and widening.
The third is systemic disorder: vulnerabilities embedded in the architecture of maritime interdependence itself. Undersea cables carry 95 percent of global data and remain largely unprotected along most of their length. Global just-in-time supply chains, optimized for cost efficiency over four decades, carry almost no buffer capacity to absorb disruption — a vulnerability that COVID-19 demonstrated under non-adversarial conditions and that the Hormuz crisis is demonstrating again under adversarial ones.
Recapitalization Without Strategy Is Not Enough
The current administration has acknowledged the structural gap and committed significant new procurement funding. The proposed nuclear-powered guided-missile battleship currently under congressional review reflects a genuine attempt to rethink force structure for a more contested maritime environment. But naval recapitalization, however necessary and however many years it takes to materialize in commissioned hulls, addresses only one dimension of a problem with three overlapping components. A larger fleet would still face coercive adversaries willing to spend $500 drones against $100 million warships. It would still rely on allied industrial capacity that has not kept pace with demand. And it would still protect undersea cable infrastructure that is largely unguarded along most of its length.
The AUKUS agreement’s provision for co-developing unmanned underwater vehicles for cable protection is a constructive step toward one element of systemic disorder. But it is a point solution in a problem space that requires a comprehensive strategic framework — one that treats maritime disorder as a continuous condition rather than a series of discrete crises to be managed reactively. Restoring the maritime security conditions of the 1990s is not achievable at acceptable cost. The question is whether Washington and its allies will develop a coherent strategy adequate to the disorder that actually exists, or continue mounting ad hoc national responses to symptoms while the underlying structural imbalance deepens in Beijing’s favor.
Original analysis inspired by Peter J. Dombrowski and Bruce Jones from Brookings Institution. Additional research and verification conducted through multiple sources.
